The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Classic Strories (15 page)

Evolved, he thought, but no better off then I was before the goddam Emergency; I sold TV sets then and now I sell electronic vermin traps. What is the difference? One’s as bad as the other. I’m going downhill, in fact.

A whole day wasted. In two hours it would be dark and he would be going to sleep, down in the cat-pelt-lined basement room which Mr. Hardy rented him for a dollar in silver a month. Of course, he could light his fat lamp; he could burn it for a little while, read a book or part of a book—most of his library consisted of merely sections of books, the remaining portions having been destroyed or lost. Or he could visit old Mr. and Mrs. Hardy and sit in on the evening transmission from the satellite.

After all, he had personally radioed a request to Dangerfield just the other day, from the transmitter out on the mudflats in West Richmond. He had asked for “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” an old-fashioned favorite which he remembered from his childhood. It was not known if Dangerfield had that tune in his miles of tapes, however, so perhaps he was waiting in vain. As he walked along he sang to himself:

It brought tears to his eyes to remember one of the old songs, from the world the way it was. All gone now, he said to himself. And what do we have instead, a rat that can play the nose flute, and not even that because the rat got run over.

I’ll bet the rat couldn’t play that, he said to himself. Not in a million years. That’s practically sacred music. Out of our past, that no brilliant animal and no funny person can share. The past belongs only to us genuine human beings.

While he was thinking that he arrived on San Pablo Avenue with its little shops open here and there, little shacks which sold everything from coat hangers to hay. One of them, not far off, was
Hardy’s Homeostatic Vermin Traps
, and he headed in that direction.

As he entered, Mr. Hardy glanced up from his assembly table in the rear; he worked under the white light of an arc lamp, and all around him lay heaps of electronic parts scavenged from every region of Northern California. Many had come from the ruins out in Livermore; Mr. Hardy had connections with State Officials and they had permitted him to dig there in the restricted deposits.

In former times Dean Hardy had been an engineer for an AM radio station; he was a slender, quiet-spoken elderly man who wore a sweater and necktie even now—and a tie was rare, in these times.

“They ate my horse.” Stuart seated himself opposite Hardy.

At once Ella Hardy, his employer’s wife, appeared from the living quarters in the rear; she had been fixing dinner. “You left him?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “I thought he was safe out on the City of Oakland public ferry pier; there’s an official there who—”

“It happens all the time,” Hardy said wearily. “The bastards. Somebody ought to drop a cyanide bomb under that pier; those war vets are down there by the hundreds. What about the car? You had to leave it.”

“I’m sorry,” Stuart said.

“Forget it,” Hardy said. “We have more horses out at our Orinda store. What about parts from the rocket?”

“No luck,” Stuart said. “All gone when I got there. Except for this.” He held up a handful of transistors. “The farmer didn’t notice these; I picked them up for nothing. I don’t know if they’re any good, though.” Carrying them over to the assembly table he laid them down. “Not much for an all-day trip.” He felt more glum than ever.

Without a word, Ella Hardy returned to the kitchen; the curtain closed after her.

“You want to have some dinner with us?” Hardy said, shutting off his light and removing his glasses.

“I don’t know,” Stuart said. “I feel strange.” He roamed about the shop. “Over on the other side of the Bay I saw something I’ve heard about but didn’t believe. A flying animal like a bat but not a bat. More like a weasel, very skinny and long, with a big head. They call them
tommies
because they’re always gliding up against windows and looking in, like peeping toms.”

Hardy said, “It’s a squirrel.” He leaned back in his chair, loosened his necktie. “They evolved from the squirrels in Golden Gate Park. I once had a scheme for them… they could be useful—in theory, at least—as message carriers. They can glide or fly or whatever they do for almost a mile. But they’re too feral. I gave it up after catching one.” He held up his right hand. “Look at the scar, there on my thumb. That’s from a tom.”

“This man I talked to said they taste good. Like old-time chicken. They sell them at stalls in downtown San Francisco; you see old ladies selling them cooked for a quarter apiece, still hot, very fresh.”

“Don’t try one,” Hardy said. “Many of them are toxic. It has to do with their diet.”

“Hardy,” Stuart said suddenly, “I want to get out of the city and out into the country.”

His employer regarded him.

“It’s too brutal here,” Stuart said.

“It’s brutal everywhere.” He added, “And out in the country it’s hard to make a living.”

“Do you sell any traps in the country?”

“No,” Hardy said. “Vermin live in towns, where there’s ruins. You know that. Stuart, you’re a woolgatherer. The country is sterile; you’d miss the flow of ideas that you have here in the city. Nothing happens, they just farm and listen to the satellite.”

“I’d like to take a line of traps out say around Napa and Sonoma,” Stuart persisted. “I could trade them for wine, maybe; they grow grapes up there, I understand, like they used to.”

“But it doesn’t taste the same,” Hardy said. “The ground is too altered.” He shook his head. “Really awful. Foul.”

“They drink it, though,” Stuart said. “I’ve seen it here in town, brought in on those old wood-burning trucks.”

“People will drink anything they can get their hands on now.” Hardy raised his head and said thoughtfully, “You know who has liquor? I mean the genuine thing; you can’t tell if it’s pre-war that he’s dug up or new that he’s made.”

“Nobody in the Bay Area.”

“Andrew Gill, the tobacco expert. Oh, he doesn’t sell much. I’ve seen one bottle, a fifth of brandy. I had one single drink from it.” Hardy smiled at him crookedly, his lips twitching. “You would have liked it.”

“How much does he want for it?”

“More than you have to pay.”

I wonder what sort of a man Andrew Gill is, Stuart said to himself. Big, maybe, with a beard, a vest… walking with a silver-headed cane; a giant of a man with wavy hair, imported monocle—I can picture him.

Seeing the expression on Stuart’s face, Hardy leaned toward him. “I can tell you what else he sells. Girly photos. In artistic poses—you know.”

“Aw Christ,” Stuart said, his imagination boggling; it was too much. “I don’t believe it.”

“God’s truth. Genuine pre-war girly calendars, from as far back as 1950. They’re worth a fortune, of course. I’ve heard of a thousand silver dollars changing hands over a 1963
Playboy
calendar.” Now Hardy had become pensive; he gazed off into space.

“Where I worked when the bomb fell,” Stuart said, “at Modern TV Sales & Service, we had a lot of girly calendars downstairs in the repair department. They were all incinerated, naturally.” At least so he had always assumed. “Suppose a person were poking around in the ruins somewhere and he came onto an entire warehouse full of girly calendars. Can you imagine that?” His mind raced. “How much could he get? Millions! He could trade them for real estate; he could acquire a whole county!”

“Right,” Hardy said, nodding.

“I mean, he’d be rich forever. They make a few in the Orient, in Tokyo, but they’re no good.”

“I’ve seen them,” Hardy agreed. “They’re crude. The knowledge of how to do it has declined, passed into oblivion; it’s an art that has died out. Maybe forever.”

“Don’t you think it’s partly because there aren’t the girls any more who look like that?” Stuart said. “Everybody’s scrawny now and have no teeth; the girls most of them now have burn-scars from radiation and with no teeth what kind of a girly calendar does that make?”

Shrewdly, Hardy said, “I think the girls exist. I don’t know where, maybe in Sweden or Norway, maybe in out-of-the-way places like the Solomon Islands. I’m convinced of it from what people coming in by ship say. Not in the U.S. or Europe or Russia or China, any of the places that were hit—I agree with you there.”

“Could we find them?” Stuart said. “And go into the business?”

After considering for a little while Hardy said, “There’s no film. There’re no chemicals to process it. Most good cameras have been destroyed or have disappeared. There’s no way you could get your calendars printed in quantity. If you did print them—”

“But if someone could find a girl with no burns and good teeth, the way they had before the war—”

“I’ll tell you,” Hardy said, “what would be a good business. I’ve thought about it many times.” He faced Stuart meditatively. “Sewing machine needles. You could name your own price; you could have anything.”

Gesturing, Stuart got up and paced about the shop. “Listen, I’ve got my eye on the big time; I don’t want to mess around with selling any more—I’m fed up with it. I sold aluminum pots and pans and encyclopedias and TV sets and now these vermin traps. They’re good traps and people want them, but I just feel there must be something else for me. I don’t mean to insult you, but I want to grow. I
have
to; you either grow or you go stale, you die on the vine. The war set me back years, it set us all back. I’m just where I was ten years ago, and that’s not good enough.”

Scratching his nose, Hardy murmured, “What did you have in mind?”

“Maybe I could find a mutant potato that would feed everybody in the world.”

“Just one potato?”

“I mean a type of potato. Maybe I could become a plant breeder, like Luther Burbank. There must be millions of freak plants growing around out in the country, like there’s all these freak animals and funny people here in the city.”

Hardy said, “Maybe you could locate an intelligent bean.”

“I’m not joking about this,” Stuart said quietly.

They faced each other, neither speaking.

“It’s a service to humanity,” Hardy said at last, “to make homeostatic vermin traps that destroy mutated cats and dogs and rats and squirrels. I think you’re acting infantile. Maybe your horse being eaten while you were over in South San Francisco—”

Entering the room, Ella Hardy said, “Dinner is ready, and I’d like to serve it while it’s hot. It’s baked cod-head and rice and it took me three hours standing in line down at Eastshore Freeway to get the cod-head.”

The two men rose to their feet. “You’ll eat with us?” Hardy asked Stuart. At the thought of the baked fish head, Stuart’s mouth watered. He could not say no and he nodded, following after Mrs. Hardy to the kitchen.

Hoppy Harrington, the handyman phocomelus of West Marin, did an imitation of Walt Dangerfield when the transmission from the satellite failed; he kept the citizens of West Marin amused. As everyone knew, Dangerfield was sick and he often faded out, now. Tonight, in the middle of his imitation, Hoppy glanced up to see the Kellers, with their little girl, enter the Forresters’ Hall and take seats in the rear. About time, he said to himself, glad of a greater audience. But then he felt nervous, because the little girl was scrutinizing him. There was something in the way she looked; he ceased suddenly and the hall was silent.

“Go ahead, Hoppy,” Cas Stone called.

“Do that one about Kool-Ade,” Mrs. Tallman called. “Sing that, the little tune the Kool-Ade twins sing; you know.”

“ ‘Kool-Ade, Kool-Ade, can’t wait,’ ” Hoppy sang, but once more he stopped. “I guess that’s enough for tonight,” he said.

The room became silent once again.

“My brother,” the little Keller girl spoke up, “he says that Mr. Dangerfield is somewhere in this place.”

Hoppy laughed. “That’s right,” he said excitedly.

“Has he done the reading?” Edie Keller asked. “Or was he too sick tonight to do it?”

“Oh yeah, the reading’s in progress,” Earl Colvig said, “but we’re not listening; we’re tired of sick old Walt—we’re listening to Hoppy and watching what he does. He did funny things tonight, didn’t you, Hoppy?”

“Show the little girl how you moved that coin from a distance,” June Raub said. “I think she’d enjoy that.”

“Yes, do that again,” the pharmacist called from his seat. “That was good; we’d all like to see that again, I’m sure.” In his eagerness to watch he rose to his feet, forgetting that people were behind him.

“My brother,” Edie said quietly, “wants to hear the reading. That’s what he came for.”

“Be still,” Bonny, her mother, said to her.

Brother, Hoppy thought. She doesn’t have any brother. He laughed out loud at that, and several people in the audience smiled. “Your
brother
?”he said, wheeling his phocomobile toward the child. “I can do the reading; I can be Philip and Mildred and everybody in the book; I can be Dangerfield. Sometimes I actually am. I was tonight, and that’s why your brother thinks Dangerfield’s in the room. What it is, it’s me.” He looked around at the people. “Isn’t that right, folks? Isn’t it actually me?”

“That’s right, Hoppy,” Orion Shroud agreed. Everyone nodded.

“You have no brother, Edie,” Hoppy said to the little girl. “Why do you say your brother wants to hear the reading when you have no brother?” He laughed and laughed. “Can I see him? Talk to him? Let me hear him talk and—I’ll do an imitation of him.”

“That’ll be quite an imitation,” Cas Stone chuckled.

“Like to hear that,” Earl Colvig said.

“I’ll do it,” Hoppy said, “as soon as he says something to me.” He sat in the center of his ‘mobile, waiting. “I’m waiting,” he said.